BOSTON – State Sen. John Keenan, D-Quincy is pushing for a new law that would require doctors in the state to prescribe opiod painkillers from an approved list of tamper-resistant drugs unless no suitable alternative is available.

The bill, filed by Keenan is intended to prevent the pills from being chewed, crushed, cut or melted to get high. So altering the pills increases the euphoric effect.

“You’d think we’d learn from history, but we really haven’t,” Keenan said in testimony at a Joint Committee on Mental Health and Substance Abuse hearing on Tuesday. “It’s worth focusing on at a state level, and introducing some legislation that’ll hopefully have an impact.”

In 2010, the manufacturer of the painkiller OxyContin, Purdue Pharma, reformulated the drug so it becomes gooey if crushed to make it harder to snort or inject. But many abusers then switched to other drugs without the same safeguards.

The prevalence of opiate addiction and overdose deaths has become an issue that many lawmakers and health care professionals have called an epidemic.

“We’re seeing ‘Generation Rx’,” Rep. James Cantwell, D-Marshfield, who attended the hearing and testified as a petitioner of the bill, said. “There were four deaths in the past six weeks on the South Shore from drug abuse.”

Cantwell praised Keenan as the leading voice on the South Shore for combating drug abuse through legislation.

Keenan was behind a bill approved in August to require doctors to use a statewide database of prescriptions for widely abused painkillers to help spot cases of doctor shopping.

Keenan said the barriers would prevent first-time users from initial abuse.

The bill would require tamper-resistant pills to be prescribed even in cases where they are more expensive unless there is no suitable substitute, and insurance carriers could not deny reimbursement for the higher priced drug. Keenan said prevention will always be more cost effective than treatment.

Rep. Paul Heroux, D-Attleboro, read a text from his sister, a pharmacist. She agreed that cost should not be an acceptable reason to not pass the bill, especially when considering she estimates abuse treatment to cost about $1,000 a day.

Co-chairwomen of the Joint Committee on Mental Health and Substance Abuse, Sen. Joan Lovely, D-Salem, and Rep. Elizabeth Malia, D-Jamaica Plain, have signed on as co-sponsors of the bill. Malia said she supports the measure because she cannot imagine drug manufacturers establishing the change on their own.

Caitlin Beresin, council to the joint committee, said she has heard no negative feedback or opposition to the bill.

“There seems to be bipartisan support for the bill,” Beresin said.

Rep. Walter Timilty, D-Milton, included himself as a proud co-sponsor on what he said is an issue that extends beyond the South Shore and across the country.

Page 2 of 2 - “It’s a national issue that’s affecting all levels of society,” Timilty said. “(Prescription drug abuse) does not discriminate against any demographic.”